Silence encourages the abuser and gives more power to them. The embarrassment, confusion and disgust that you feel after the act of sexual assault has happened is damaging to the self worth and self-esteem. It starts to teach you that you are not worth and you need validation from everyone around you. You feel everyone is judging you because you constantly judge yourself and you feel that you deserve whatever has happened to you or happening to you. You reaffirm about your own feelings as you are not allowed to express yourself the way you are feeling so the fight within yourself starts taking toll on your body and since we keep the feelings bottled up, the brain makes compartments to store the information in the body. The body starts remembering things when its in a relaxed state or even a small trigger to remember the incident that changed you gives you a panic attack and flashbacks. It's gushing of all sort of emotions so the brain cant take it and asks the body to help and body takes a little on itself. That's when we know that we have build those walls up so high that we are not letting anyone in and most importantly not even letting our feelings out too. Always questioning about all our decisions and life choices and feeling belittled and not feeling proud of ourselves. There is self sabotage and lack of self love.
Maximum times the abuser is known or a family member and the victim is asked to keep quiet and never say anything to anyone. So what about the feelings of the victim? Why there is a burden on the victim to bear the relationship responsibility and maintaining the relationship in the eyes of the society and people is so important that they dismiss or try to hide the actions of the abuser? This sketch that I made shows what happens to the child when they have to go through something like this. This may be disturbing to few but we should not be silent anymore. We need to talk more about child abuse, they are not just small kids with amazing imagination skills or just attention seekers.
Staying silent gives the abuser the opportunity to push your boundaries even more and then we loose the sense of our identity and not able to build healthy boundaries in any relationship. When people say they feel they should be a bigger person and forget what has happened in the past but they have not dealt with the pain, well not felt the pain or loss, they hide a part and keep it aside and not let the anger come. Doesn't mean that you have to go and punch the person but you have to let yourself feel whatever emotions are coming to you and see it as a visitor, acknowledge it, sit with it so you can let it go and finally move on. Its like I feel angry so you say okay, its fair enough and its okay to feel that way. Lets think about why we feel the anger? Is it resentment, irritation, pain, grief and that anger is trying to protect me so I don't feel the pain? Then it slowly starts to unveil and peel the layers. Instead of identifying with the emotions we have to look at the emotions from a third person's perspective. So Instead of saying I am angry we can say I am feeling angry. Acknowledge it, then you can see it from a distance and introspect, as in where it is coming from and then finally let it go.
Stopping to let ourselves feel helps to take the pain away or going numb helps to ease the pain but all that is temporary solution. People who try to show that they are very strong and they don't cry or show their vulnerability tend to hide a whole lot of things inside their body. Pain, anger, resentment, shame, guilt, embarrassment etc. The courage is in showing your wounds and opening up and not in showing that you are strong or wear a mask and be a people pleaser, think about yourself first. SPEAK UP even if no one believes you, the truth will come out and people will know who was right or who was wrong.
If someone asks me what would I say to my child self, I would say to learn how to self parent and learn to trust yourself. Be patient with yourself and love yourself. You do not need to share every single details of your day or life with anyone as long as you have your self esteem intact, no one can harm you. Everyone should go through therapy and the therapist has to be a good one.
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